Saturday, May 07, 2005

Well thank goodness that seems to be over. Though a bit late, and we shuffle to the grave of HB 1515 to praise it rather than bury it, the whole bumbling I think had one fantastic result: when enough pissed off employees express their displeasure, executive management does take notice and act.

I can only hope that this new bit of realized empowerment can be channeled into something just as effective from the point of view of employee owners being concerned about the direction of Microsoft and the lack of accountability for those unable to ship. Speak up!

Now if you find yourself on the other side of the issue and being pissed off about Microsoft's support and feeling this isn't the company for you, well, sit right down. All that advice I gave to pro HB 1515s applies just as well to you. If you feel this company's actions are out of line enough with your values and what you define as important in living your life, there are plenty of other places I'm sure that'd be willing to hire you onto your staff and not trouble you with such political theater.

Rather than just cursing about it, follow Jeff Koertzen's example of living his values and submit your resignation and move on.

Other than that, things will be slowing down here as the weather gets nice and I find myself enjoying biking into the late sunny hours. Unless I get a flash of brilliant insight I just have to share (which I'm sure you know the odds-on favorite for laying your money down on the likelihood there), I'll be happy to post once a week. There's certainly a lot happening to type about: the major review, upcoming re-laddering for PM and Dev, welcoming our new HR chief, and decoding Bob Herbold's advice to Microsoft. But right now, the road is flat and wide and dry, and I have many miles to peddle pedal before I type.

Updated: just finally got around to fixing this HTML-escaped post. Closure. Ah. Plus going through wiping out the usual naught comment-spams.

26 comments:

Anonymous
said...

It is great to see that MS is finally starting to get the message that when there is an outcry by a large number of employees something needs to be done. This is very different from the way they handled last summers benefit cuts.

I second that. While growth slows to a crawl, the stock collapses, we can't ship shit and Bill/Steve give their prerecorded "everything's fine and success is just around the corner" spiel, at least Mini is trying to avoid this death spiral by highlighting the issue and trying to identify and address some of the causes. You may or may not agree with him/her but at least he recognizes what the market clearly has, namely that there's a problem - and has provided a forum for others to comment and present their own ideas. Given that senior management still seems unprepared to even acknowledge that a problem exists, I'd say that's a valuable service.

Disclaimer

These are sole individual personal points-of-view and the posts and comments by the participants in no way represent the official point-of-view of Microsoft or any other organization. This is a discussion to foster debate and by no means an enactment of policy-violation. These posts are provided "as-is" with no warranties and confer no rights. So chill. And think.